The level of biomarkers in body fluids is used in the process of detecting numerous health affections. Measuring the level of one or more specific biomarkers in the blood is typically a fast and relatively inexpensive means for diagnosing a disease or leading to the diagnosis thereof before prescribing other (more expensive and/or time consuming) tests such as radiological, cytological, histological and immunological tests etc.
However, many challenges face a medical (or veterinary) practitioner in selecting a panel of biomarkers to be tested for any specific case, and then in interpreting the results of the measured level of each biomarker in view of the symptoms the patient is exhibiting. The symptoms are generally only broad indicators of any particular disease, since some diseases, such as infection-related diseases, trigger symptoms in a patient at the onset of the disease or shortly thereafter, while other diseases, such as many types of cancer, trigger symptoms a considerable time after a tumor starts to develop. Diagnosing the underlying disease often requires testing for a panel of biomarkers, where some tests may be conducted to confirm a suspicion of a disease, while other tests may be conducted to rule out one or more other diseases.
Along with the challenge of choosing the panel of biomarkers for testing, there is the challenge of interpreting the test results. Some biomarkers are proven to be tightly correlated with the presence of a certain disease, while other biomarkers provide only a probability level a patient has a particular disease. For example, in humans sustained hyperglycemia is a good indicator of diabetes, while, for example, in dogs an increased level of thymidine kinase above a given threshold is an indicator of Hemangiosarcoma, which should be confirmed through histology.
Moreover, screening, diagnosing and/or monitoring a disease may involve any number of tests. According to existing methods and systems, when using biomarkers the broader are the symptoms, the more tests are carried out. A practitioner uses his/her own experience to interpret the test results when using biomarkers to detect a disease, to follow the progression of a disease and/or to monitor the result of a treatment. The latter introduces a level of subjectivity in diagnosing test results, which may cause discrepancies between interpretations by the same person over time, among practitioners and even among entire health institutions.
Therefore, there is a need for a method and system for selecting a set of biomarkers and developing a method of use for detecting one or more target diseases and differentiating between the diseases to help a practitioner interpret the test results and potentially reveal the underlying affection or the propensity of a patient to develop a given disease.